Before I tell you the back story I'll give you my review right up front. Global PSD (A USA BASED…read moreCOMPANY out of San Francisco) is amazing. They are responsive, professional, detail oriented, dedicated and good as they get. Their product is beyond comparison.
Here's the story. Our publisher in the United States had screwed up our book production time line in such a way that we could not longer print 10,000 books in the US with our current printer and then air freight 250 books to Hong Kong. Instead we had to find a printer who had facilities in Asia that could meet our less than three week deadline for an event in Hong Kong of September 20, 2012. The books were needed for the launch our international business book Paid to THINK at the Foreign Correspondence Club to a jam packed room of notable guests.
We had a lot riding on the project.
After reviewing at least 10 bids from around Asia and the US we selected Global PSD not because they were the cheapest, but because everyone from the CEO to front line management were responsive in a manner that no other company could compare. In fact there price, including freight back to the US was almost double what I was paying. What I wanted was reliability and quality.
To get the 250 books we ended up ordering 4000 books in total with a special inaugural mark on 250. Making the project a little more challenging.
(The final price for PAID TO THINK in the US was $3.70 with freight including 4 split shipments, Global's final price was $7.25 per book. Both companies had to do a special inaugural mark and both overran books however the US company gave us a huge discount on the overruns. So in total we paid approx $14,000 USD over what we would have paid in the US due to our publisher's mismanagement as well as selecting Global PSD.)
What makes the story so amazing is that this company was not producing a digital print but planned on printing a sheet fed, hand sewn, case bound, museum quality book in about three weeks. Most typical digital case bound printers want 5 weeks in the US.
In addition, the company, unlike our other US printer with facilities in the US, created a dummy book so that we knew what we were to be receiving before the books were created. This simple, yet fantastic surprise helped us to solve other challenges that arose only because we had not been told that our publisher had changed our book size. A huge, terrible, fall in love with your own idea, silo' d thinking, mistake by our publisher. If Global had not been so professional to have sent us the dummy we would not have been able to address the enormous amount of fires that erupted in a timely fashion to at least mitigate our losses.
I'll add that when we asked Global to make a spine change, they did so without a single complaint, Unfortunately when we asked our US printer to do the same, they hemmed and hawed, made an error in the spine change so when we told them about the error they replied back that any new changes would add 3 weeks to the production which we could not afford.
Lastly, Global worked with us on payment. They put the order into production as they waited for the deposit. When it came to delivering the books to our event in Hong Kong they did so without final payment...TWO DAYS EARLY. As the project was coming to a close we then wired them another $10K because we did not have an exact figure for ocean shipping and they once again shipped with a balance due on the account. I mention this because our other printer needed every dime in house before they were to ship even one item and yet they too already had almost 80% of the fund in house because we also wired them another $10K at the same time. Besides the individual at our US print shop knew I was working in Hong Kong, Bangladesh and I was in the air in route for upwards of 52 hours so my access to banking was limited. My US printer didn't care if we did not meet our deadlines. (Even their standard invoices are negative. They have printed all over the place warning such as don't pay in 7 days and they would charge storage. The invoice was sent to us when I was in the air and my wife was also on a 27 hour plane ride back from Asia) When we gave them the names of other vendors who've told us we are one the best accounts we have because we often pay net 30 invoices upon receipt, they didn't care. Money or no ship.
Global PSD cared more about our delivery, our win, our business, our investment by a factor of 10. I've worked all around the world and I've witnessed few organizations that are as responsive. Sometimes so responsive I had to tell them to make some of the decisions for me.
Oh, and by the way, I've had people marvel at their books. People who've been in printing know we went overboard for our launch quality book and for those lucky 3750 other people who purchase the book at retail, they too will be in for a treat.
David Goldsmith
Goldsmith Organization
Author of Paid to THINK
